Mow Lawn, Mo’ Problems

Matt Darroch: Picture this: It's the weekend, and the grass is looking a little overgrown. So it's time to fire up the motor. The sun is shining, wind in your hair, and you're cutting crisp stripes. Something deep in your soul is activated: the satisfaction of bringing order to chaos. And when your work is done, you're left with the glorious smell of freshly trimmed grass clippings.

But what if we have it all wrong? What if a well-manicured lawn isn't the end-all be-all? What if it's actually harming the local habitat?

Doug Tallamy: I ran across this statistic that we have 40 million acres of lawn in this country. Now I know lawn does not do any of the four things our properties need to do. It's not sequestering carbon, it's not supporting pollinators, it's not supporting a food web, and it's not managing the watershed. So I said, "Gee, what if we cut that area in half?" So not going to get rid of lawn, but we—everybody reduced their lawn by half—that would give us 20 million acres we could restore right at home.

Matt Darroch: From Virginia Humanities, this is With Good Reason. I'm Matt Darroch. Today on the show: "The Case Against Lawns."

Doug Tallamy is the co-founder of Homegrown National Park. It's a non-profit that urges property owners to reduce their lawns and plant native plants. He shares all the little things we can do to help restore functioning ecosystems and mitigate the biodiversity crisis. Doug is the T. A. Baker Professor of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Delaware.

Doug, you say we're in the midst of a biodiversity crisis. How bad is it?

Doug Tallamy: It is worse than people think. It's very bad. We're losing the plants and animals that run the ecosystems that support us on this planet. Just in this country alone, we've lost 3 billion breeding birds in the last 50 years. Got a paper out the other day saying we lost 22% of our butterflies just since the year 2000. Everything that is being measured is declining. We've got global insect decline. You know, if you think about what it takes to make one clutch of chickadees, takes caterpillars. And it takes thousands of caterpillars—6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to get one clutch of a bird that's a third of an ounce to the point where it can leave the nest. So if you lose those caterpillars from your yard, you no longer have a breeding chickadee. The loss of insects, the loss of caterpillars and decomposers and pollinators from our ecosystems means that everything above them is collapsing as well. Two-thirds of Earth's wildlife—and they're really talking about mammals—have already disappeared. I don't have the data on plants, but it's, you know, many thousands of species of plants are endangered or already gone. So, it's everywhere, and it really is a crisis.

Matt Darroch: Now this biodiversity crisis really, uh, hit close to home for you, no pun intended. [laughs] When you bought the property that you currently live on, tell me about that.

Doug Tallamy: Yeah, we bought a section of a farm, 10-acre section of a farm that was broken up in the year 2000. And it was an old farm, been farmed almost 300 years. And the last thing they did was mow it for hay. Not sure how many years they did that, but when they sold the property, they took it out of mowing. And when you mow for hay in Southeast Pennsylvania where we live, you're really mowing the rootstocks of all the invasive plants from Asia: multiflora rose, and Oriental bittersweet, and Japanese honeysuckle, and autumn olive, and on and on and on. So when you stop mowing, that's what comes back. And we—by the time we actually moved in, we had 10 acres of invasives. You couldn't even walk. So step one, if you're going to restore functioning ecosystems, you've got to get rid of that stuff. But it was that experience, actually, that pointed out to me the seriousness of our invasive plant situation, the fact that that our insects don't eat these plants. So right away, you've got the collapse of the food web right there. That all hit home very, very—yeah, hit home, [laughs] right in my home. And it changed the direction of my research, and I've actually been studying that and talking about that ever since.

Matt Darroch: Yeah, I mean, when I—when I bought my property a few years back, the previous owners had planted wisteria in our backyard, and it was like, all overgrown. So like, fast forward to now and it's been four years, and I—I still haven't managed to eradicate it. You know, all of this to say, getting rid of invasive plants isn't for the faint of heart, right? It—it takes a lot of elbow grease.

Doug Tallamy: Yeah, uh, wisteria is a great example of something very tough because of its huge root system. So you can cut it back, it looks like you've gotten rid of it, but it will come up from that root system for a long time. Same thing with Oriental bittersweet, same thing with bamboo, same thing with porcelain berry—I mean, there's so many of them with these huge root systems that they—they plague you forever.

Matt Darroch: So what are the big changes you've noticed on your property, uh, after transforming it into a kind of, you know, haven for native plants?

Doug Tallamy: Well, you can—I like to measure the biodiversity that has come back to our—our property. And we're doing that in two different ways. One is to count the number of bird species that have bred on our property, and we're up to 62 species. That's a good—good measure of success, because they couldn't breed there if there wasn't the food to support them. And the other thing we do is measure the food that supports them, which is moths. And I have been measuring them for, ah, it's probably nine years now. And I am up to 1,358 species. So, yeah, life has returned. And that encourages me because I know it works.

Matt Darroch: [laughs] I'm picturing your backyard like that Snow White scene in the forest when she's singing in harmony with all the animals.

Snow White (audio clip): [Singing high notes with birds chirping]

Doug Tallamy: It can be like that, yes. [laughs]

Matt Darroch: Um, so your experience revitalizing your own property is what kind of gave you the idea to start the Homegrown National Park. Give me the rundown on—on what that organization's all about.

Doug Tallamy: Yes, exactly. Well, I—I ran across this statistic that we have 40 million acres of lawn in this country. Now I know lawn does not do any of the four things our properties need to do. It's not sequestering carbon, it's not supporting pollinators, it's not supporting a food web, and it's not managing the watershed. So I said, "Gee, what if we cut that area in half?" So not going to get rid of lawn, but we—everybody reduced their lawn by half—that would give us 20 million acres we could restore right at home. How big is 20 million acres? I started adding up the acreage of our major national parks. You can put all of them in there, and it's still less than 20 million acres. So I said, "Hey, that's enough to create a new national park, and it'll be the biggest national park in the country. We're going to do it at home, so we'll call it Homegrown National Park." And I talked about that in my—my talks for years, but we didn't actually start the organization, homegrownnationalpark.org, a small non-profit, until I met a woman, Michelle Alfandari, who had just retired from a branding career in Manhattan. And she was a perfect member of what we call the "non-choir." She didn't know anything about nature, she didn't care about nature, she lived in Manhattan. But she retired and moved up to Connecticut, and her neighbor urged her to go to one of my talks. And she did, she went, and she came up to me afterwards and she said, "You're not reaching your target audience. You only speak to the choir." I said, "Yeah, it's only the choir that invites me." [laughs] She said, "Well, you know, you're not going to accomplish your goal if you don't—you don't reach the—the non-choir." And I said, "You know, that takes social media, all kinds of things that I really don't do." And she said, "Well, I do do that, and—and I think we need to start a non-profit so that you can reach the millions of people that you're really talking about." So that's how Homegrown National Park came into being. It really is—it was my idea, but it was Michelle who made it happen.

Matt Darroch: I get that it's best to plant native plants because they've adapted to the local habitat and are easy to grow. But how do native plants also help mitigate the biodiversity crisis as well?

Doug Tallamy: It's not that they're easy to grow. Yeah, they are. But, um, the real reason is that they are the basis of the food web. So all plants are capturing energy from the sun and turning it into simple sugars and carbohydrates, which is, uh, you know, that is the food that supports just about all the animal life on the planet. Well, if you don't get that food to animals, you don't have any animals. And if you don't have animals, you don't have functional ecosystems, then you lose the life support and humans disappear. It's serious stuff. So how do we get that—that food to particularly our vertebrate animals? That's what insects are doing. Insects are transferring more food from plants to other animals than any other type of plant eater. So if we design landscapes that don't have a lot of insects in them, primarily caterpillars in this part of the world, then you have failed food webs and eventually failed ecosystems.

So, native plants are very good at sharing the food they have—have captured and created from the sun with our native insects. That's the tie-in. Our native insects are not adapted to eating the plants from Asia or Europe or South America. And that's because all plants are protecting themselves in a number of different ways, but the primary way is chemically. They've got—they've got secondary metabolic compounds in their tissues that make them distasteful to insects that don't have the adaptations to breaking those down. This is why the monarch butterfly can only eat milkweed. If you take milkweeds away, the monarchs are not going to start to do well on your wisteria or on hostas or on your English ivy or anything else. They can't eat those things. So there's the—there's the native plant tie-in. We've got to use the plants our insects co-evolved with.

Matt Darroch: But of course, not all non-native plants are invasive, right? And—and lots of non-native plants are, I don't know, absolutely beautiful. So—so do you have any advice to help us resist the temptation to plant our—our favorite non-native plants?

Doug Tallamy: Well, you're right. Not all non-natives are invasive. All invasives are non-native, but not all non-natives are invasive. And so many of them are well-behaved: ginkgos, crepe myrtles. They don't go anywhere. They also don't pass on their energy at all. So, I think of them as decorations that we put in our yard. I like to talk about them as if they're statues. So, yeah, it's a decoration. But how many statues do you want in your yard? Plants have really important functions, and yes, we can compromise. We can use those favorites that we like as long as they're not invasive. But when they dominate our yard—and right now, the typical residential landscape is about 82% non-native—that's dominating. Then the system breaks down.

Matt Darroch: Is it okay to plant a few of our favorite non-native plants as long as the garden is—is mostly native plants?

Doug Tallamy: Yeah, we actually did a—a study, you know, how many plants have to be native for you to have a functional food web? We studied Carolina chickadees, and by "we" I mean my grad student Desiree Narango, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. So it was one study with one bird in one place, but she came up with a figure of 70%. If 70% of the plant biomass on your property is native, you can have a viable food web. Obviously, the more native biomass the better. And it's not just native versus non-native, it's productive natives. I could plant a 100% native landscape that supports very little, because not all natives are equal in what they support.

So another thing we came up with is the—the concept of keystone plants. Just 14% of our—our native plants are supporting 90% of the caterpillars that drive that food web. So those are the ones we want to make sure are in our—in our yards. You know, we can have other plants, too, we can compromise, but a yard without keystone plants is supporting very little.

Matt Darroch: You know, there are so many plant varieties, it can really seem like the choices are—are really endless. And to sift through all of that to find the native plants in your area, you know, takes some pretty intentional research. What—what resources are available to kind of ease that process?

Doug Tallamy: Uh, several years ago we created—it's a section of the National Wildlife Federation website called Native Plant Finder. You go to Native Plant Finder and put in your zip code, and the ranked list of the most productive woody and herbaceous plant genera in your county will pop up. So that tool alone makes it very easy for you to—to pinpoint, uh, the—the genera of plants that are most productive. Which species you use, now it comes down to personal taste, what's available, what grows in your specific soils, and so on. But it's a very good starting point.

Matt Darroch: You know, the—the biodiversity crisis is scary and widespread, but it does seem like there's a—there's an opportunity here to—to make an impact, a positive impact, one person at a time.

Doug Tallamy: Yeah, because there's a lot of persons out there! [laughs] What do we have, 330 million people in—in this country? If everybody took conservation seriously and the little things they can do to help conservation, we really could make a—a dent in this crisis. The UN has met three times to talk about the global biodiversity crisis, and they're working on resolutions, you know, what are we going to—Of course, we ignore those resolutions. The last meeting, the US didn't even go. We were the only country in the world not to go. So this becomes a grassroots solution. We're not going to depend on top-down regulation to—to solve these problems. We've got to solve it ourselves, and that empowers us. A lot of people are concerned about the—the state of the planet, but they figure, you know, "What can one person do?" Well, you can improve the ecological integrity of the little piece of the Earth that—that you either own or can influence. Obviously, if you own property, that's where you start. If you don't own property, help somebody who does, help a land conservancy, or a park, or a preserve. They're all underfunded and they're all understaffed, and they will love you as a volunteer. So there's something all of us can do, and—and then we're part of the solution instead of part of the problem. We can see the results. Um, Aldo Leopold said that the, uh, ecological knowledge, uh, means you—you—you live in a world full of wounds. Well, we can heal those wounds. So that's the goal. Everybody becomes a—a wound healer instead of a wound maker. Uh, and—and we feel good about that. We feel good about that.

Matt Darroch: How can people join the—the Homegrown National Park?

Doug Tallamy: It's very simple. You—it's free, I didn't mention that, so [laughs] we're not trying to pull membership away from any other organization. You just go to our website, homegrownnationalpark.org, and register your property on the biodiversity map, and then the amount of area that you're going to be a good steward of. So maybe you really are going to reduce the—the area of lawn, maybe you're going to plant an oak tree, the most powerful plant you can put in your yard. But that area is then going to go into our database, and your piece of the county in which you live is going to light up with a firefly. And, of course, we want to light up the entire country with fireflies.

Matt Darroch: Well, Doug, thanks for sharing your insights on With Good Reason.

Doug Tallamy: You're quite welcome.

Matt Darroch: Doug Tallamy is the T. A. Baker Professor of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Delaware and the co-founder of Homegrown National Park.

Quarry Gardens is the first and only native plant botanical garden in Virginia. It started off as a soapstone quarry. Now it's an environmental gem with a beautiful quarter-mile loop boasting over 500 species of native plants.

Devon Floyd: Hi!

Matt Darroch: Nice to meet you.

I met up with Devon Floyd in Schuyler, Virginia. He's the executive director of the Piedmont Discovery Center, which now manages the Quarry Gardens.

Matt Darroch: Yeah, yeah, it's hot. I had to put the hat on. [laughs] Yeah. So, I don't need to burn my bald spot. [laughs]

Devon Floyd: [laughs] Same here, man. Yeah.

Matt Darroch: He took me around the whole property, showing off the quarry pits and the ancient ecosystems he calls "lost worlds."

Devon Floyd: First of all, we're in a really strange place, because the bedrock is made of soapstone. Basically, what happened was, you know, the soil here is too shallow and rocky naturally to plow. Right. And then, the soapstone breaks down into a magnesium-concentrated, like, saturated clay. And that stunts plant growth, and it's really horrible for things like flax, and wheat, and corn, and hemp, right, all those historic crops. Hm. And so, um, in the modern world, this landscape doesn't work. It's hard to develop and build a house here without having an alternative system. So what you end up with are these large areas over soapstone that are avoided from the development or agricultural standpoint. So they're never plowed. So you've got that ancient, old-growth soil column and all of the organisms that are in it. Wow.

Matt Darroch: Wow. Well, take me—take me to one of the restoration areas where you're trying—trying to bring it back.

Devon Floyd: Let me show you first one of these old-growth patches. It's right here, right in front of you, in the parking lot. [laughs]

Matt Darroch: [laughs] Oh, I can see the rocks. Is this soapstone?

Devon Floyd: This is a cousin of soapstone. So the soapstone doesn't—it comes in lots of varieties here. This is a serpentinite. All right, so you're standing here in the middle of what is probably a 3,000- to 10,000-year-old biology. The structure has changed significantly, because the stems are temporary. You can cut a tree down like the one behind you there, that's a hybrid between post oak and white oak, and it will resprout. And the natural fire can rip through here and kill it, and it will resprout. So the organism is older than the stem. But here we've got this old soil column, and botanists know because there's weird plants here! [laughs] There's—there's not just one goldenrod species, there's seven. There's not just one thoroughwort, there's eight. So, the cool thing is diversity is always really high. This is one of the most species-rich or diverse spots in North America.

Matt Darroch: Really?

Devon Floyd: It's right beneath your feet, and you—you get 100 to 120 species per 100 square meters.

Matt Darroch: Wow. Wow. That's wild. To me, it looks like tall grasses that I would never be able to identify. [laughs]

Devon Floyd: Yeah, I mean, as a—as a botanist, when you look down, you kind of get your mind blown. It does start with that, "Hey, this kind of looks like, you know, a grassy area."

Matt Darroch: What—what kind of catches your eyes?

Devon Floyd: Right away, I see, uh, small white snakeroot, this—this one right here, which is a—a basiphile that loves soapstone and serpentinite bedrock.

Matt Darroch: Hm. Does it flower?

Devon Floyd: It does. Um, it looks really, you know, quiet right now, and it is, but it makes a bold white cluster.

Matt Darroch: Hm, cool.

Devon Floyd: And if you start looking around, there's not 1, 2, 3, there are thousands. [laughs] So when it does bloom here, that species, this whole woodland, this savanna remnant, is white. What I really see here that—that is striking, that makes me pause right away, is that there are multiple species per genera. So each type of plant is diversified into lots of different varieties in one spot.

Matt Darroch: I see. I see.

Devon Floyd: That takes a lot of time and sort of stable, um, conditions that all of those plants need for a great amount of time. And all of these plants need mostly full sun. They're old grassland plants. And so when you see that mixed together, it's kind of a window into the past, but also an extraordinary window into the potential for restoration on degraded landscapes, because this is where the wisdom is.

Matt Darroch: That's cool. What do you—what do you have to—what's the process of restoration? Is it just leave it alone, don't touch it, or [laughs] yeah, what's the process?

Devon Floyd: Actually, counterintuitively, that's the worst thing you can do for a system that's adapted to agitation. Hm, interesting. So if you leave things alone in Eastern North America, biodiversity goes down. Hm. Um, to restore these systems is a significant pile of work that involves a relationship. And if you've ever been in a relationship [laughs] of any kind—

Matt Darroch: [laughs] It's a lot of work.

Devon Floyd: —maybe there's some therapy involved, too. [laughs] There's tears, right?

Matt Darroch: Compromise, for sure.

Devon Floyd: There's—there's compromise, that's right. Um, without losing core values. And if you have that, then—then you can see ecological renewal even on the most degraded landscapes. But, um—

Matt Darroch: Sorry, caterpillar. [laughs]

Devon Floyd: Oh! Yeah, fast moving one. Hey buddy.

Matt Darroch: Very, very hairy caterpillar, too. Looks like a wild eyebrow. [laughs]

Devon Floyd: It's a moth caterpillar. 

Matt Darroch: Sorry, continue. 

Devon Floyd: Yeah, and that was a that was a eastern minced lizard about to eat it, and it changed its mind because of the prickles. 

Matt Darroch: Never seen that in Virginia before. I'm from Florida, so we have lizards all over the place. But this looks like a Florida lizard.

Devon Floyd: Oh yeah, I mean that's that's one of the most common lizards in this area, natural landscapes. It's um very gregarious. It will often be seeing you, even though you don't see it. They're they're everywhere.

Matt Darroch: Very cool. Now this is soapstone, right?

Devon Floyd: Yeah, yeah. So you're you just walked on soapstone pavers like you do in Friday Spring. We put it on display here at the Overlook. Gives people a really hefty introduction to soapstone. These weigh about 16 tons each. 

Matt Darroch: They're massive. 

Devon Floyd: Yeah, yeah. They're sort of you know this three feet wide, five five feet by three feet by eight feet. You know, big rocks,and we place these here as a sit spot. But you can also explore these rocks and learn a lot if you're here as a geologist, yeah. 

So here, yeah, here's the view.

Matt Darroch: Oh wow!

Devon Floyd: And hear the wind. That's one of the the sounds here are really special. If you're walking here by yourself,we get sort of a a consistent birdsong, bee buzz, and then breezes like this, and then there's you know a stream valley back there. So there's the sounds of water back there. 

So these quarry pits were excavatedto about 90 feet,and then the water table. Yeah, yeah, super deep. So the water, you know, after they were abandoned and filled back up, the pumps were removed, and the water filled back up to the water table. So you're looking at the water table, the natural aquifer water table there. That's that's why it maintains itself. That's actually a pristine, you know. 

Matt Darroch: That's interesting. And do we know if there's any lagoon monster living in the water? 

Devon Floyd: We've looked. We have. We last month we had a volunteer crew of underwater archeologists drop by and do a preliminary transect survey. It's our first archeological survey here. Was underwater archeology, and they found very little in the way of objects or monsters. There's there's artifacts from the middle part of the 20th century, because this was used as a dump after it was abandoned. So, so some parts of it close to us here, where it's easy to back a truck up to, you'll see, you know, refrigerators and ovens and you know chairs and things like that in the very bottom.

Matt Darroch: But these are are these loblollies? 

Devon Floyd: No, these are so loblollies not native to this particular location of Virginia. These are Virginia pine. There used to be about 50 of them here. We took them all out except these to mimic the effects of fire that fire would have over about 10 years, just to fast track that process, and you can see what happened. 

Matt Darroch: Wow, it's green. It's very green. 

Devon Floyd: It's very really diverse. So this is one of those settings where we're like, okay, we see clues that it's kind of like that spot I just showed you, but there's too much shade. So let's remove that pressure, and bam, it all it was all dormant, and it all just rebounded.

Because remember, there used to be a savanna on this ridge top. And it needs sun. And so if you don't, if you take the fire off and the human agitation, you get this dark thicket woodland, and all of this stuff goes dormant. You just get pine needles and oak leaves on the ground. You can look at the early French and Spanish explorers. Just look at their maps. You'll see words like Savannah, or Grand Savannah, or Deserta Eranosa, or the Plains.

So you can look at historic documents.You can look at place names. Grassland, Virginia, is one of my favorites. But you know, and when you get those. Well, when you get in those older areas that are poorly developed, you you kind of get a concentration of the place names. They all kind of start pulling together. But again, they're you know they're circumstantial evidence. 

Matt Darroch: You mentioned all the all the clues we have, all all the evidence we have of the grasslands, of the prairie land here in the central Virginia area. How does that impact the way we think about conserving or stewarding this land here in Central Virginia? 

Devon Floyd: Well, it gives us a completely different narrative. You know, in the mind's eye, we all hold these dark virgin forests stretching from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. That narrative, right? And that narrative is quickly undone by all of those lines of evidence, so we have a new story, and we also realize that 95% of that old savanna landscape has been destroyed. When the settlers moved in, these were open spaces; they were the easiest ones to cultivate. They didn't need to take down trees. They were destroyed first, and we did also cut down the massive forests that were in the region.

So what this does is it gives us are really the most diverse systems in Virginia, the rarest ones. Oh, and guess what? They're the ones that the pollinators that we all love associate with. If you're going to support monarchs, whether you plant savanna species, bumblebees, they all need that open space. The birds that have declined the most in North America, probably globally, are grassland-affiliated birds.

So it brings to the front both the time-sensitive nature of the problem because no one can see these things. They're easy to to destroy. They get destroyed every day. They're tiny. They've been pressed to the margins. You know, back to the forgotten edges, squeezed almost to nothing. Some of these patches are the size of a living room. 

So there's urgency. They're tiny, which means they're at risk. So for modern conservation, education is so critical. We've got to get the get the word out to the general public that Eastern North America has always hosted a menagerie of forests, wetlands, and grasslands, and the grasslands were tremendously diverse and very widespread. 

If we can do that, maybe people will care. But you know, honestly, all you have to do is take people to see an old-growth grassland remnant. You can step in with a group of people, and you don't have to say anything. It talks. They're like, oh, okay, I see. There's purple as far as the eye can see. That kind of thing.

Matt Darroch: Devon Floyd is the executive director of the Piedmont Discovery Center.

This is with good reason. We'll be right back.

Welcome back to With Good Reason, from Virginia Humanities.

The Virginia Wildlife Conflict Helpline is a toll-free number people can call to report run-ins with bears or complain about raccoon intruders. My next guest studies the data from the hundreds of calls from the helpline. Jim Parkhurst is a professor of wildlife science at Virginia Tech. He sits down with my colleague, Sarah McConnell, to talk about the ways we humans can better coexist with wildlife.

Sarah McConnell: Jim, it seems like many decades ago, people lived differently than we do now. Many more people were farmers or lived on farms or adjacent to farms. Many more people, even if they weren't farmers, hunted and enjoyed hunting on their own, or they lived in homes that were larger plots of land. And all of this gave them a different relationship to encounters with wildlife, wouldn't you say?

Jim Parkhurst: I would say for sure that that was the case in in recent decades. We had a very strong familiarity with what was, you know, living on our lands, things that we were sharing with the resident wildlife. And so we came to know a lot of their behaviors, and we had some, what I would call reasonable expectations as to what was considered normal behavior or the kinds of interactions that we would expect to have with these animals.

And unfortunately today, um, we've moved away from that. We have the vast majority of our population now living in in urban areas. They don't participate as much in outdoor activities that bring them into close proximity with wildlife. And so I think we've had kind of a, sort of a a loss of connection with the natural world in some regards. And so there's a lot of, uh, lack of understanding, not quite sure of what's considered normal and expected behavior with these animals. And in many cases, they don't know how to react when they do have interactions with wildlife.

Sarah McConnell: Looking back to when you were much younger, how did people who were farmers, hunters, more rural people, deal with various animals in your recollection?

Jim Parkhurst: Well, there's an adage out there now that rural folks, uh, like to take matters into their own hands and they know how to solve problems. So, but that came from having that knowledge and experience with wildlife. But if they had a problem with a groundhog, they knew how to trap it, and suddenly the problem is gone.

In my own background, I never grew up on a farm. Uh, I did live in a rural community, but I gained most of my experience initially in just simply being outdoors and having time to spend there. And then secondarily, I was very active in the Boy Scouts. And that, uh, certainly placed us into the environment much more and in interacting with wildlife as we go camping and going on other activities with the troop.

So, we seem to have lost some of those opportunities today, or interests have changed enough that people are not participating in in those activities.

Sarah McConnell: About 10 years ago, you and your colleagues set up a statewide line in Virginia where residents could call in and report conflicts they were having with various species. I'm curious, as you looked at who was calling in about what animals, was it a large number of different animals, different species that people had inquiries about?

Jim Parkhurst: Well, as you noted, back in 2014, we here in Virginia established a 24/7, seven-day-a-week toll-free helpline. And so during that time, we have been averaging somewhere around about a hundred different species of wildlife broadly defined that somebody has called in and and complained about or asked about or wanted to learn more about.

If I was to sort of start at the top and rattle down as best as my memory can recall here, we've got lots of calls from bear, deer—those are the two top ones, and just enormous numbers of calls for them.

But then it's sort of the common suite that people might expect of things like raccoons, skunks, opossums, rabbits, beaver, a variety of squirrels, a lot of different birds—Canada geese is a big one, woodpeckers is probably another big one.

Sarah McConnell: When I was young, I remember being outdoors a lot, and I encountered all sorts of creatures that delighted me: salamanders and crawfish and raccoons and skunks and turtles and frogs and toads, box turtles. Tell me about some of the animals that delighted you when you were growing up.

Jim Parkhurst: I tended to pay a lot more attention to the feathered friends, mostly songbirds that would come to our bird feeders or that I would see in the yard. So, typically a lot of the chickadees and titmice and grosbeaks and the things that during wintertime are going to be around and visiting the feeders. At other times of the year, I would be trying to figure out what that sound was from our diversity of warblers and vireos. And so that sort of started me on the pathway and ended up making my career was having that interest in and fascination with these species.

Sarah McConnell: I remember having dinner on the screened-in porch and hearing owls from the woods nearby. And my father, who had been a hunter and knew lots of different ducks and birds, but now no longer hunted and just appreciated the animals, would imitate the calls of the owls, and the owls would respond. [laughs]

Jim Parkhurst: Yeah, that sounds like a lot of folks that I know. You can get pretty good at making those kinds of calls and mimicking them, and they will respond. So, it can be very fun and sometimes challenging to see how closely you can duplicate and whether they figure out that you're an imposter. [laughs]

Sarah McConnell: [laughs] Um, tell me about where you live now and the kinds of animals that you interact with just at your house and in your neighborhood.

Jim Parkhurst: I'm located uh about seven or eight miles outside the Blacksburg proper and away from campus. I would still classify it somewhat as a semi-rural area, although we are fast becoming urbanized with townhouses and condominiums.

But I do have enough sort of woody habitat in the backyard, so to speak, that I do see a a fairly high diversity of species. Right now, I'm witnessing, you know, a lot of different birds that have come into the yard. I I have made it a a purpose of trying to plant my gardens with native vegetation, in particular, things that would foster presence of pollinators and birds. So, I've planted a lot of berry-bearing shrubs that attract a lot of songbirds.

But on a daily basis right now, I've got a group of rabbits that have been very productive this spring, and they're all over the place. Recently, I had a situation of dealing with about eight different groundhogs that were trying to eat everything in sight.

No different than anybody else in this area, we have plenty of deer, and on various occasions, I can count up to eight or nine different individuals.

A few years ago, we were very fortunate in having a pair of gray foxes show up in the neighborhood, and they spent quite a bit of time carousing through the backyard and showing themselves, still being cautious at a distance, but that was kind of unique for what I would consider not ideal habitat for them.

Certainly, we have skunks and opossums. Kind of the suite of the animals that are successfully adapting to their sort of coexistence with humans.

Sarah McConnell: Have there been times when you didn't want eight or nine deer in your backyard? [laughs]

Jim Parkhurst: Uh, constantly. [laughs] They are capable of doing some serious damage in the course of a couple of nights. And so, I mean, I'm no different than anyone else. Even though this is sort of my avocation here, I'm still trying to find ways to keep them at bay and not destroy all of my landscaping that I purposefully have been planted either for my own aesthetic value, but more importantly as part of the wildlife habitat that I've created. So, they're they're a pain.

Sarah McConnell: What have you tried in the past that didn't work so well for you, and what have you sort of settled on more recently?

Jim Parkhurst: Well, one of the things that I often tell clients when when they call in looking for assistance, there's there's sort of a hierarchy in the suite of options or tools that you have at your disposal. And typically, I always try to tell folks, let's start with the simple, the inexpensive, easy to implement things. And if those don't work, then we work our way up in the hierarchy to things that are a little more complex, a little more time-consuming, and in most cases, probably more expensive.

So to start with, I've looked at ways in which I can alter what I've planted, with a focus on trying to find things that might not be as palatable or attractive to deer. But the downside with that in in a lot of cases—not just in my backyard, but when the number of deer per area, or what we would call the density of deer, reaches a certain threshold—every one of those animals is still going to need to eat. And depending on how bad it might taste to them, they're going to start nibbling on things that otherwise they may not have shown interest in.

And so that was initially what I found is, it didn't matter whether I was planting highly attractive or things that would be less attractive, they were sampling pretty much everything that was out there.

Sarah McConnell: Did you ever get around to trying coyote pee? [laughs]

Jim Parkhurst: I haven't, um, mostly because what I've read from the research, it does not have as as long-lasting or, again, it's sort of a numbers game that despite how strong it might smell, they're still going to want to eat something. So, that one has not proven to be as effective as some other things.

If somebody wants absolute deer protection, they need to put up a 10-foot-high woven wire fence. That's the only thing we know that will keep deer out. Most all the other types of fencing will allow for some penetration—they'll figure out a way to get around it—but it is effective in reducing the damage.

With repellents, I would say try them. Don't rely on just one type of repellent, but use them in rotation so that the deer don't get used to that particular scent or odor or taste.

Other than that, with high deer density, there's not much that's going to work.

Sarah McConnell: Do you get many calls for people reporting black bears doing damage on their property?

Jim Parkhurst: We get a lot of calls. They are the number-one species on our list of of calls coming in to our helpline. It it is a mix. I wouldn't say that all of those calls represent a damaging type of conflict, but a lot of them are. It could be also somebody looking for information, just trying to learn more about how to coexist with bears even though they have not had an event yet with them.

Sarah McConnell: And what's your typical advice that's the most effective?

Jim Parkhurst: The most effective thing that people can do is to be aware of their own activities that may be drawing attention from these animals. So that would include things like how you store the refuse for the home. You know, where is your your garbage can? Is it put out to the curb before pickup? Do you feed pets in the backyard, and that food is not protected? Do you have bird feeders, particularly suet feeders? Those are highly attractive to bears, particularly as they come out of hibernation.

Compost piles is another thing where that represents potential food resource for bears.

And the last one is sort of the barbecue grill. It may be on the back deck. Uh, if those things are not cleaned regularly and the tray that accumulates the cooking grease and oil is not emptied regularly, that has a very strong scent that bears will pick up, and they will be drawn in and investigate where that smell is coming from.

So, anything that we do that can serve to attract these bears is important, and we need to change those behaviors to eliminate, or at least alleviate, that uh tendency to encourage bears to come close.

Sarah McConnell: How do you feel about the subject of mountain lions? Many people call in and say they've seen them, or they see evidence of them. Many animal wardens say, "Not true." Where do you come down?

Jim Parkhurst: Well, I would have to say at this point, I need to be convinced. I have not seen any reliable evidence to suggest that we have a viable population here in Virginia. It's not to say that there aren't occasional individuals that may be moving through, but we really are focused on whether there is a viable, reproducing population before we say we have mountain lions in the state.

We know they're moving around. There have been indications pretty well-documented in news reports of animals that have been shown up or or uh been seen, but we don't have anything that really points to that situation here in Virginia. So, I'm a little bit skeptical of some of the reports we get. Every one that I have investigated, or people have sent me photos from their trail cams, has ended up being something other than what they thought it was.

One of my good friends and and colleagues from grad school who was uh on the staff of the West Virginia Wildlife Department recalled an incident for me when he was doing some survey work out in the Monongahela Forest, and he came upon a female with kittens. So, we do know that there are individuals around, but in terms of a population, we do not yet have that here.

Sarah McConnell: Well, so many of your calls are people having slightly negative encounters or worrisome encounters with wildlife. You must also come to appreciate how much variety there is out there. People are living among animals of just infinite variety.

Jim Parkhurst: Well, that's true. Another portion of my responsibility is to help people who wish to enhance opportunity for wildlife. So, I do spend a fair amount of time working with clients trying to figure out what do they have on their property right now, how is that serving the needs of wildlife, and in what ways can we fill some of the voids in what the property currently affords that will make things better or help attract a greater diversity of species.

So, I I don't want to cast everything, uh, our interactions with wildlife as always negative. I think for the most part, people are intrigued with wildlife, they're interested in it, it fascinates them, and they appreciate seeing these species in areas where they can see them. A lot of times they tell me, "I like the diversity, but just not in my backyard." [laughs]

Uh, and so I think there is some of that tendency that the negatives, whether it's it's due or not, sometimes influences people's attitudes about wildlife.

Sarah McConnell: You know, you hear about people attracting hummingbirds and butterflies and the like. What other species are you finding people hoping to lure onto their property by making it suitable for them? You know, chipmunks?

Jim Parkhurst: I do get quite a few calls from people who say they want to attract more deer. [laughs] And that one's a little hard to take seriously sometimes, but when you do have individuals who have a a hunting background or they've just gotten a, you know, opportunity to buy a new piece of property and they want to improve it for hunting, you can understand why that question comes up.

But for most people, it's things that they hope to see closely in their backyards. So, you mentioned, for example, the hummingbirds. That one, I do get a lot of questions on how to attract them, what do I put in the feeder, should I clean the feeder—all of those kind of things that are related to sort of maintaining a a hummingbird station.

But in other cases, it's just simply people want to see diversity. They do see the common things, but they're trying to figure out, "How can I see things that I don't normally see, and is that possible?"

But it's amazing what can be done even on, you know, a half-acre uh home site in terms of what you plant, what kinds of vegetation you maintain, things that you can do to just make the habitat a little more diverse and offering more opportunities.

Sarah McConnell: What about box turtles? I haven't seen a box turtle in a decade, and I used to see them all the time. Is their population dropping or am I just missing them?

Jim Parkhurst: No, unfortunately, you're correct. Box turtle numbers have been declining pretty substantially over the last couple of decades. A lot of that is due to habitat fragmentation and habitat loss. Box turtles have relatively small home ranges, but as we build roads, subdivisions, and commercial developments, we chop up their habitat and make it much harder for them to survive and move around safely.

Traffic is a huge killer of box turtles, especially in the spring and early summer when they're moving around looking for mates or nesting sites. On top of that, illegal collection for the pet trade and diseases like ranavirus have also taken a toll on their populations.

Sarah McConnell: If someone finds a box turtle crossing the road, what is the best thing they should do?

Jim Parkhurst: If it is safe for you to pull over and do so, the best thing you can do is help it across the road in the direction it was already heading. Don't turn it around and take it back where it came from, because it will just turn right back around and try to cross again. And definitely don't pick it up and take it home or relocate it to a different area or a park miles away. Box turtles have a very strong homing instinct. If you move them out of their home range, they will spend the rest of their lives wandering aimlessly trying to find their way back, often crossing more roads and eventually dying in the process.

Sarah McConnell: That's such an important point that people often don't realize when they think they're saving an animal.

Jim Parkhurst: Exactly. Intentions are almost always good, but without knowing the biology of the animal, human intervention can sometimes do more harm than good. That’s really at the heart of what we try to do with the helpline: educate people so they can make informed decisions that benefit both themselves and the wildlife we share our land with.

Sarah McConnell: Well, Jim Parkhurst, thank you so much for sharing your time and expertise with us today on With Good Reason.

Jim Parkhurst: It's been my pleasure. Thank you, Sarah.

Matt Darroch: Jim Parkhurst is professor of wildlife science at Virginia Tech.

With Good Reason is produced by Virginia Humanities, which acknowledges the Monacan Nation, the original people of the land and waters of our home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Our production team is Sarah McConnell, Allison Quantz, and Lauren Francis. Special thanks to Jennie Taylor for booking assistance. For the podcast, go to withgoodreasonradio.org. I’m Matt Darroch -- thanks for listening.